Mayco & Tech Soft 3D

The Challenge

Headquartered in Michigan with 43 global locations across nine countries, Mayco provides design, engineering, tooling, manufacturing, assembly, sequencing, logistics, and systems integration services as part of its overall mission to be the Tier 1 automotive supplier of choice for its customers. Efficiently carrying out that mission requires a fair amount of technological groundwork behind the scenes, including giving different team members throughout the organization the ability to view CAD files that contained important information.

“Someone in purchasing might need to look at 3D drawings for a particular component they’re procuring from a vendor,” explained Ted Lukiewski, IT Director at Mayco. “Pretty much our only choice is to either buy them a license for the CAD application that created the file, or to buy them a CAD viewer. That might be fine if they only received Catia files. But the next day, they might receive a Pro E file, and the day after that, an NX or AutoCAD file, and we’re back to square one, trying to get them access to the information they’ve received.”

One consequence of this challenging situation is that “workarounds” would develop: Teams that didn’t have a CAD application or viewer would lean on members of the design and engineering team to open files for them, pulling designers and engineers away from their core tasks. Additionally, the situation placed a substantial burden on the IT department, while slowing down the overall speed with which various departments could carry out their work.

“We were handling nearly 20 tickets a month related to gaining access to CAD files,” said Lukiewski. “The time really adds up: You have to put in a purchasing requisition, get a PO and price quote for the product, purchase it, install it, and then show the user how to use it. That’s a multi-day affair – and if I’m a program manager or a purchasing estimator, that’s too much time. They need to make decisions ASAP.”

An Enterprise Visualization Solution

SpinFire Insight was an ideal solution to the challenges Mayco was experiencing. An enterprise visualization solution, SpinFire Insight provides a way for entire organizations to view, mark-up, and fully analyze 2D and 3D CAD data in all the major formats.

“We could have tried adding a few more floating licenses of various CAD applications and CAD viewers, but that approach just wasn’t scalable,” said Lukiewski. “Also, most of the viewers didn’t provide a way to do basic mark-up or file conversion, which would have created bottlenecks in the workflows. We did some back of the napkin math and realized that getting the enterprise edition of SpinFire Insight was a very smart choice, cost wise.”

Mayco decided to make SpinFire Insight part of its standard desktop load across the organization, so that every single team member in every department would be able to open whatever 2D or 3D CAD files they needed to access.

“It doesn’t matter if our users receive a Catia file or an NX file or a Pro E file,” said Lukiewski. “They just click on it, and it opens up in SpinFire Insight. They don’t have to do anything on their end to make that access happen – and in many cases, they don’t even realize they’re using SpinFire Insight. That’s the best kind of tool there is, as far as I’m concerned: one that users don’t even have to think about – it just works.”

With SpinFire Insight in place across the organization, Mayco has been able to experience several significant benefits. For starters, team members no longer have to contact IT or resort to unofficial workarounds in order to open up and view CAD files – greatly speeding up their turnaround time on their various tasks.

“Using SpinFire Insight, we’ve reduced the wait time for end users to get access to an important CAD file from 3-6 days to 0 days,” said Lukiewski. “The resolution of their problem is instantaneous: They click on the file, and SpinFire Insight opens it for them so that they can start acting upon that information.”

As much as teams like purchasing and estimating have benefited from SpinFire Insight capabilities, Mayco has also been pleasantly surprised at unexpected use cases that have sprung up across the organization.

“Our HR and Health & Safety department uses it quite a bit, which wasn’t something we initially foresaw,” said Lukiewski. “As an enterprise-wide solution, SpinFire Insight didn’t just solve the specific problems we had; it also gave us the solution to problems that we didn’t even know we had.”

Looking forward, Lukiewski feels that SpinFire Insight tackles the challenges they face today while better positioning Mayco for the future.

“The auto industry is changing and evolving very quickly,” said Lukiewski. “SpinFire Insight futureproofs us, because no matter what CAD application our customers or their suppliers decide to use, we’ll be able to open the files they send us. It’s not something we need to worry about – we have a scalable and flexible solution for visualizing CAD data as we move forward.”